ReasonablyDoubtful wrote:In this post, I teach Kaharz that reading is fundamental!

First of all, let's ignore the fact that when I quoted you about sources, I was specifically quoting a section of your post claiming that elite runners are underfat, because what you've given me is actually gold.

But wait... didn't you link another observational study in regards to vegetarianism?

Why yes, you did!

Kaharz wrote:There are other studies that may indicate the effect is not due to the meatless diet, but due to the intake of healthier foods in general. Such as this one:http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7060/775

A few side notes: One of the studies I linked found vegetarians as having a higher incidence of eating disorders. I found an interesting hypothesis on that by an ex-vegan. From her experiences, she thinks that veganism appeals to annorexics. I would wonder if maybe that doesn't extend to vegetarianism as well. In other words, the eating disorders aren't caused by the vegetarianism, but people with eating disorders are more likely to choose a vegetarian diet than those without.

One final side note before I draw this to a close: Vegetarian diets have been shown to have a negative effect on the reproductive health of women and there is a smatteringof evidence that the same holds true for men. I know that quite a few denizens of the internet would consider that a good thing, but that's a little short-sighted, in my view, both from a stance of knowing that people's views about having children tends to change as they age and from considering the implications of evolution and being unable to reproduce (in other words, reproductive health as a predictor of overall health).

I'm going to go ahead and hold off on replying to the part about running (I'm assuming that you still won't take me at my word), as this post has taken me several hours and I have things to do today. I will however, comment on this:

Kaharz wrote:

It's more than that. The US Government doesn't fund studies from people whose studies go against their official stance. One researcher was even blackballed after he published a book detailing the issues with the official stance not long after the official stance became official.

This does happen of course, but there are a lot of other governments, non profits and organizations that fund studies. And the government does not always defund studies that go against their stance. But I guess you are right and anything that goes against what you say is part of the conspiracy.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. We could dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. The problem with that is that conspiracy theories have a distinct lack of a paper trail (which is something that, for some reason, conspiracy theorists seem to think proves the conspiracy). On the other hand, remember what I mentioned about homocysteine levels and heart disease? This is something we should have known 30 years ago. Why didn't we? Because Kilmer McCully's theory ran counter to the NIH's official policy. He could receive no government funding. Sure, government funding doesn't account for all of the funding scientists receive, but keep in mind that a good chunk of the "industry" funding goes to "prove" that BPA is safe or cigarettes don't cause cancer or... well, see the study Tom Naughton referenced in that video I linked.

Gary Taubes wrote:Though the conflict-of-interest accusations served to discredit the advice proffered in Toward Healthful Diets, the issue was not nearly as simple as the media made it out to be and often still do. Since the 1940s, nutritionists in academia had been encouraged to work closely with industry. In the 1960s, this collaborative relationship deteriorated, at least in public perception, into what Ralph Nader and other advocacy groups would consider an “unholy alliance.” It wasn’t always.

As Robert Olson explained at the time, he had received over the course of his career perhaps $10 million in grants from the USDA and NIH, and $250,000 from industry. He had also been on the American Heart Association Research Committee for two decades. But when he now disagreed with the AHA recommendations publicly, he was accused of being bought. “If people are going to say Olson’s corrupted by industry, they’d have far more reason to call me a tool of government,” he said. “I think university professors should be talking to people beyond the university. I believe, also, that money is contaminated by the user rather than the source. All scientists need funds.”

Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did. “To be a dissenter was to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism,” George Mann had written in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1977. The NIH expert panels that decide funding represent the orthodoxy and will tend to perceive research interpreted in a contrarian manner as unworthy of funding. David Kritchevsky, a member of the Food and Nutrition Board when it released Toward Healthful Diets, put it this way: “The U.S. government is as big a pusher as industry. If you say what the government says, then it’s okay. If you say something that isn’t what the government says, or that may be parallel to what industry says, that makes you suspect.”

Gary Taubes, in case you didn't know, wrote Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion and Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. He's made a career out of informing the public about the politics of science, but since Good Calories, Bad Calories (6 1/2 years ago), he's focused his work on nutrition. Funding, though, is always in the politics of science. Oh, and Robert Olson was a major dissenter when the McGovern Committee was formed to tell the public about how terrible fat and cholesterol are.

That was actually pretty interesting.

I tried to find his nutrition blog based on his saying he made this post into a blog post but there are just too many.